handwaved
handwaved is the simple past and past participle of handwave.
Meaning of handwave
Verb
handwave (third-person singular simple present handwaves, present participle handwaving, simple past and past participle handwaved)
- To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.
- Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #92;tfrac#123;#92;partial#125;#123;#92;partial#92;rho#125; as a differentiable vector field on #92;mathbb#123;R#125;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.2001, Stephanie Frank Singer, Symmetry in Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction, page 33
Questions about handwaved
- What is handwaved the simple past and past participle of?
- Handwaved is the simple past and past participle of handwave.
Words near handwaved in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: handwaved (page history and authors); handwave (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “handwaved.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/handwaved. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
